The main thing that qualifies me to write about Richard Linklater's Boyhood from a panicked new-ish father's perspective is that I had to wait three weeks to see Boyhood even after all the rapturous reviews came out, on account of having fled New York City in terror a couple years ago so I wouldn't have to raise… »8/06/14 12:36pm 8/06/14 12:36pm

1. Boyhood makes you want to protect—to save—everyone onscreen. They're not in any sort of peril, at least not plainly so; there are alcoholic dads and neighborhood bullies and some broken hearts, but no one's ever in any danger of being attacked by a bear or anything. But without ever seeming to try, Richard… »7/09/14 12:06pm 7/09/14 12:06pm

Few things have shaped my existence more profoundly than the realization, courtesy of the 1994 film Reality Bites, that there are two kinds of women—Janeane Garofalos and Winona Ryders—and that I would never, ever be a Winona. (Other things I discovered painfully, early on, that I would never be: a Shalom Harlow, a… »2/21/14 4:22pm 2/21/14 4:22pm

Did you want to learn that Jesse and Celine, the couple we fell in love with as they fell in love with each other in the Richard Linklater films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, have become cantankerous, unhappy middle-aged jerks? That their love has curdled into passive-aggressive routine and barely disguised… »5/21/13 5:36pm 5/21/13 5:36pm

For a genre that remains a Hollywood staple, horror doesn't get much respect. If a film isn't screened in advance for critics, it's usually a horror movie. Although they dominate Halloween, they're also the movies that get dumped at the deadest corners of the release calendar: January and late August/early September.… »10/11/12 6:15pm 10/11/12 6:15pm